Education and the Rigorous Tying Up of Milk ☆

It always surprises me when people seem to get away with the argument that we need better education in order to maintain our national primacy. Tired nationalism keeps on kicking. And yet, isn’t it interesting how compelling it is in its apparent simplicity? Even as we become sensitive to the atrocities of Empire, the notion of staying ahead educationally seems reasonable and compelling.

If this is the prime ideological context for education in this country, then ironically the call for rigorous education is couched in the most un-rigorous of dreams. Rigor is merely de rigour: a question of etiquette and protocol.

Education as the diplomatic extension of war. The Luke-warm War, we could call it.

Interestingly, Larry Cuban, takes an alternative tack. Instead of pushing into the absurdity of the competitive drive, he simply decouples its educational assumption. Just because we want to stay ahead, doesn’t mean more education is the answer:

“[Asian nations] want their kids to excel because they understand that whichever country out-educates the other is going to out-compete us in the future. So that’s what we’re up against. That’s what’s at stake -– nothing less than our primacy in the world…. And I want to commend all of you for acting collectively through the National Governors Association to develop common academic standards that will better position our students for success.”

Does this leave our dream intact, and just call for a rethinking of the numbers? Or does showing the un-grounded nature of the dream itself ask us to reevaluate why we find the narrative so compelling?

Or is it more difficult than that: is it the call for rigor that is operative, which is precisely in opposition to any rigor achieved? We must keep ourselves busy. In this case, the most radical proposition would be that we don’t even want to keep ahead of the world, we just want to not have to think about what we are doing in the name of education. This would be the more elusive danger.

I am reminded of the joke about the farmer who refuses to lend his neighbor a rope because, he claims, he is using it to tie up his milk. The neighbor points out how absurd that is, to which the farmer responds, “Maybe, but if I don’t want to lend you the rope, one excuse is as good as another.”

The joke, of course is that you aren’t supposed to say that to the person’s face. It is de rigour to at least come up with a reasonable sounding excuse. But the truth is that we hardly want to be bothered. In this sense, pointing out the absurdity of logic changes nothing. Whether we are using our rigor to tie up milk or not hardly matters, what we prefer is not to have to come up with a good use for it. In that case, the real joke is not that we have said the unsayable at the expense of the neighbor, showing competition to trump reason.

The joke is instead that the neighbor is our excuse for why we rigorously tie up our milk. The neighbor is expendable, but as a necessary expense to cover up the absurdity that the tying of milk is essential.

Well, if nationalism ever really petered out, we’d just make up some other exercise in tying up our milk. Human beings seem quite proficient in avoiding discomfort of any kind- all this flailing around about education and standards and testing and holding someone- anyone- “accountable” for whatever it is that shows up on tests.

I like this discussion. It makes me think of a parallel problem, however, which are those countries that come up with excuses not to educate their populations. Take, for example, apartheid South Africa which had a regimented system that determined what kind of education different groups were able to obtain — and where to want more was to aspire to something “above one’s station.”

Excellent points. In some sense nationalism is, today, the living dead. If it were really alive we would find it abhorrent. But as a means to elude absurdity, such a vague generality serves to distract us. To fight it–as in a kind of global egalitarianism–however, runs the very same risk. To cover up the absurd practices of education, here and now.
This is the paradox. The “right to compete” can be used to buttress the very stratifications it promises to transgress. To aspire “above one’s station” in that sense, is both a revolutionary act, and a surrender.
Whether we motivate ourselves by thinking that Japan is cranking out a superior techno-educational product, or that we should at least be thankful that we have options of upward mobility that South African’s lacked under apartheid, the very foreignness allows the generality to slip by.
“Eat your rice, there are children in China who would…” only impresses on parent and child that one must absurdly act gluttonous in the name of starvation.
Likewise–and I’m sure I’ll get in trouble here–the fact that voting, in certain limit cases where it is precarious, can be an extreme political act, is hardly an argument for it being a relevant act in the US today.
In a perverse way, in the US, education itself runs the risk of being the excuse not to educate. Here the joke would become even more absurd: I can loan you your rope as long as you use it to tie up milk.

Yeah, its that pesky historical context thing. Nationalism in the anti-colonial sense helped people expand their range of movement but we have a habit of trading in one set of fetters for another. With education, we’re taking a mechanistic model of economic activity- one that hasn’t adapted well to change or produced durable results- and applying it to education. In the name of expanding equity, we’re completely degrading what education is. Human beings really are quite magical in their ability to willfully deceive themselves. I can’t speak for zombies or elves of course…